Author: Adam Morgan / Source: 99U by Behance
Exceptional work isn’t created by the answers others give us, but by the questions we ask ourselves.
Imagine if, before you tackle today’s creative work, you first needed to stand by your desk and say this:
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
Of this client who so excitedly hired me,
To shepherd their story,
And help build their brand,
On this hallowed internet ground.
Ridiculous, right? Well, for thousands of years, people didn’t think so.
Creators throughout history, like all of those Ancient Greek poets you learned about in school, would routinely open their works by invoking the Muse. Without it, they believed, they were incapable of being creative.Although that seems ludicrous, we suffer from distant echoes of that belief today. Of course, instead of the Muse, we now outsource our creativity to other things, invoking them before we feel ready to begin anything: the guru, the industry expert, the trend, the case study, the expert who we just need to meet for coffee to hear about their best practices, and so on.
We search for our answers “out there.” Our creativity is not ours to control. Apparently.
However, we all possess an inherent tool to be proactive about our abilities: our intuition. Unfortunately, we shy away from discussing the idea because it’s often viewed (mainly by those who control budgets) as something no more practical than invoking a Greek deity to do our work for us.
Why intuition isn’t taken seriously in business
In researching for my new book, I found countless definitions of intuition. Albert Einstein allegedly called it “a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.” Authors like John Naisbitt (who defined it as “deriving meaning from data”) and Malcolm Gladwell (“rapid cognition”) have explored concept, while in business, entrepreneurs like Chase Jarvis, the CEO of CreativeLive, and even Amazon’s Jeff Bezos often refer to it as an internal guide to make better decisions. In research psychology, people like Gary Klein and Gerd Gigerenzer conclude that our ability to pattern match and find coincidences between situations help us either arrive at better conclusions (Klein) or weed out irrelevant information en route to one (Gigerenzer).
Regardless of how it’s defined, intuition doesn’t feel overly practical to use. To hone the skill, we’re forced to — what? — experience a whole mess of things in the world and hope that we’ve improved our intuition? And so, the business world often views conventional wisdom or trendy new tactics or expert advice as far superior to intuition, because it feels more concrete.
The power is real
What if we could make intuition concrete, too? The benefits seem too powerful not to try. You’ve experienced these benefits before, I’m sure: suddenly, you just know. Like an instant clarity generator, you’ve found your answers. Just imagine if we could be proactive about that!
Well, if we revisit the word itself, I think we can. “Intuition” comes from the Latin intueri, which simply means “to consider.” So, consider that the most creative among us don’t possess any gifts or receive special inspiration we lack. Consider that the best among us are masters at considering the world.
We can master that ability too, if only we’d make one switch in the way we make decisions at work: We need to stop obsessing over everyone else’s right answers for us and start asking ourselves better questions.
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